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Useful tools for people who create iOS apps
LaunchKit makes it easy to build iOS screenshots in all resolutions, app website landing pages, monitor your app reviews in Slack, receive daily sales reports, and identify your app's super users. Save yourself time and money with these easy to use tools.
launchkit.io
News
The Joy of Shortcuts
Allen Pike on the Parse shutdown that was announced last week. I wrote briefly on the balance between using a dependency like Parse over building everything yourself in last week's comment section, but this article digs into it in much more detail. Marco Arment also makes a good point about App Store economics playing a big part in these decisions as well.
allenpike.com
How To Migrate Your Parse App To Parse Server With Heroku And MongoLab
So if you are affected by the shutdown and have decided to go down the route of implementing your own copy of Parse Server, this guide by Reinder de Vries might come in handy. It takes you step by step through a basic implementation of the server on Heroku, using MongoLab as your database.
learnappmaking.com
Tools
Hirundo: Swift Mailing List Reader for Mac OS X
Part of the problem of keeping up with the Swift mailing lists is trying to pick through the conversations either in your email, or on the web archive. It's not a great experience, especially if you're trying to dip in and out of it. Amazingly, Benedikt Terhechte has put together a dedicated Mac app specifically for viewing the Swift lists! You can view the full archives, search and even highlight your favourite contributors. Great idea!
stylemac.com
Code
RxSwift at first sight
I've mentioned ReactiveCocoa several times here, but I haven't linked to RxSwift before. Rx is a cross platform (kinda) implementation of FRP and of course, there's a Swift implementation of it. Agnes Vasarhelyi looks at the basics as someone who is coming from ReactiveCocoa. There's also a sample app if you want to see it in action. Also published this week and worth a read is Mark Aron Szulyovszky using RxSwift to implement some gesture recognition code.
alltheflow.com
Many Controllers Make Light Work
Soroush Khanlou with an interesting take on iOS architecture. He investigates using lots of view controllers added to a parent, each responsible for a specific piece of behaviour. It's an interesting technique for sure and while it maybe feels a little unnatural in places, I think there's something to the approach.
khanlou.com
ClockKit Tutorial: Add a complication to an existing watch app
Although apps on the watch haven't been very exciting, I did have some hope for complications. Unfortunately they too have been a little disappointing, maybe due to the fact that adding a complication to an existing app is a bit tricky. Kristina Thai walks you through the process of adding the additional extension for a complication to your watchOS project.
kristinathai.com
Design
Craft
If you're designing mockups or final screens for an iOS app it's likely you're sick of duplicating UI elements in your design tool, then editing in different data for each copy. Craft is a new tool which plugs into Photoshop or Sketch that can duplicate elements and fill them with dummy names/addresses/photos/etc... This is going to be a real timesaver.
invisionapp.com
Business and Marketing
Why most A/B tests give you bullshit results
Do A/B tests work? Sometimes, but it's not a guarantee of improvement. This article looks at how to run effective tests and the reality that only the successful A/B tests get talked about!
mixpanel.com
Interviewing, applying and getting your first job in iOS
Many people reading this are already working full time in iOS development, but not everyone is in that situation. If you're just starting out with your career you'll want to check out this article by Orta Therox for how to approach getting your first iOS job.
github.io
Videos
Fix Issue
Tim Ekl talking at the Seattle Xcoders group recently with a quick run through of the provisioning and code signing process. He also suggests giving the Fix Issue button a try again, apparently it's much better these days! I'm not sure I'll ever be able to click it without wincing though. 😬
vimeo.com
Sponsored Jobs
Senior iOS Engineer @ Babbel , Berlin - Germany
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Some of the biggest questions that have been asked since Swift was announced are around how Apple are going to make a more Swifty interface to the Cocoa APIs. Well, this week, Apple published a post on the Swift blog which covers some proposed changes to make a more Swifty Cocoa API. If you want more detail than is in the post, you can also view the three proposals on Swift Evolution (1, 2, 3).
I think It's really unlikely that we'll see any kind of pure Swift implementation of UIKit (at least UIKit as we know it today) and so making it nicer to work with from Swift is really important.
The proposals have been around for quite a while now and today is the end of the review period. I'm looking forward to seeing the results and how this improves how we get apps written in Swift.
Dave Verwer